I cannot help but feel that being a software developer in the Microsoft ecosystem requires me to spend half my time keeping up with new technologies that I might have to use, and the other half of the time I am actually working. It is frustrating to look at a landscape that is seemingly going through a 20% - 25% yearly churn rate on technologies. In the last 10 years, I count five native UI front end technologies: WinForms, WPF/XAML, Silverlight/XAML, Metro/XAML, and Metro/HTML. And if you count mobile, you get Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7's variant of Silverlight. While many of these systems are similar, each evolution requires substantial amounts of re-training to work with.

The fact is that keeping up with this churn is quite painful. I look enviously at PHP, Python, and Ruby developers who rarely go through these kinds of major changes. I am at the point where I've reached a critical level of frustration with Microsoft's inability to stay the course.

J.Ja

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